So now that you know it’s important to reach your website visitors and not let your competitors take them away, let’s address the next question:

Which is Better: Facebook or Google Re-Targeting?

Can GDN convert website visitors into customers better than Facebook?

To answer this question, we ran an experiment for 2 months, generating 1,846 clicks and 56 free trials.

In other words, we converted 3.0% of our traffic from Facebook and Google into free trials.

But one platform accounted for most of it – can you guess which? (continue reading to the end of this post to find out!)

What Got Us Here?

Let me cut the long story short.

As of March this year, we had 5,000 new free trials a month. This may sound impressive, but considering that more than 280,000 people visit our website every month, we are only converting 1.96% of them into free trials.

This means we are losing 98% of them (and some potentially to competitors)!

So to get more people to join our side, we conducted this experiment.

Specifically, we have 2 goals:

To find out if GDN and Facebook can generate free trials for us at a cost that makes sense.

To see which platform is better and spend more money there.

Here’s our hypothesis:

Hypothesis: There is no significant difference in cost per free trial between GDN and Facebook.

Now that you know the reason why we conducted this experiment, it’s time to look at how we did it!

Our Discovery Plan

Who did we reach?

Let’s start by discussing our targeting.

As mentioned, we are trying to compare GDN and Facebook to see which platform is more effective at converting website visitors.

As a result of their combined efforts, some of these people may sign up for free trials as we are running this experiment.

Besides, the difference in viewthrough conversions between GDN and Facebook isn’t much.

GDN recorded 123 viewthrough conversions in 30 days while Facebook recorded 105 of them in 28 days.

The difference in viewthrough conversions isn’t big and we think that including them would over-exaggerate the success of the campaigns.

In conclusion, if we were to just consider clickthrough conversions, it seems like our hypothesis could be wrong. There is a chance that both platforms have a significant difference in their effectiveness!

Other Insights

So now we’ve already talked about the results, but there’s more to it than just concluding that “Facebook is better”.

We drew up 3 things that you could take away:

One experiment of this size is not enough proof to categorically conclude that GDN is inferior to Facebook when it comes to retargeting your website visitors.

We could consider a more sophisticated way to measure the true effectiveness of our test, instead of excluding viewthrough conversions completely.

At the end of 60 days, none of the free trials on both GDN and Facebook have turned into paid subscribers yet*.

* This data is based on 30-day click attribution on GDN and 28-day click attribution on Facebook.

1. Our tiny experiment is not enough proof to conclude that GDN is inferior to Facebook when it comes to retargeting your website visitors.

If anything, it merely disproves (for now) that GDN can easily drive a similar cost per free trial compared to Facebook for us.

Facebook and GDN are different in many ways, including, but definitely not limited to these factors:

Users on Facebook may be targeted with our ad based on their behaviors, content consumption, and other data that Facebook collected about them. In a way, they may see our ad at a time where they are more ready to take action.

GDN ads may be easily missed by users as ad units could be obscured on the websites that they visit. Many of them may also not view the ads long enough to see the entire message.

Facebook ads become part of the newsfeed that users consume on a daily basis; GDN ads are less intrusive and follow users throughout the web.

With this in mind, we will certainly carry out new tests on GDN, such as using:

A still image instead of an animated ad.

A copy that speaks directly to the user , just like the Facebook ad copy.

Sharper color contrasts so that the ad attracts users’ attention and generates more clickthroughs.

If you have successful case studies running GDN ads, we would love to hear your suggestions! Just leave your suggestions in the comments section below 🙂

2. We could consider a more sophisticated way to measure the true effectiveness of our test, instead of excluding viewthrough conversions completely.

Measuring your results is easy when you only have one marketing tactic. Simply measure your input and output.

Think of it as a typical cooking show.

When you have a single cook preparing a dish, you can evaluate his skills by tasting the dish.

But when you have multiple cooks preparing one dish, it’s hard to evaluate a single cook’s skills based on the dish alone.

You have to measure the separate preparations that go into it, the readiness of the dish at each point before it is handed over to another, and so on.

The same can be said for our experiment.

If we wanted to know just how well our experiment did, we need to measure it differently.

For example, we could stop all the other marketing activities involving website visitors and leads.

3. At the end of 60 days, none of the free trials on both GDN and Facebook have turned into paid subscribers yet*.

At the current point of writing, 60 days after we started the experiment, we have yet to record a single paid subscription from both campaigns.

Assuming that this remains the same another 30 days down the road, these results point to a possible problem in the message or ad that we produced.

Perhaps those who signed up for our free trial had some expectations that were unmet.

Or maybe these are “window shoppers” that are going around just to try different tools and they aren’t serious about investing in social media tools just yet.

Or maybe our tracking is broken. We are investigating to see if this is the case.

If our tracking is indeed the problem, then we will update this post later and re-run the experiment.

Over to you

That’s it!

In a nutshell, our experiment results indicate that Facebook may be a more effective retargeting medium than GDN.

However, we cannot categorically rule out GDN at this point. Our plan is to build on our findings, investigate our tracking system, and develop another set of creatives to test both networks again.

In the longer term, we want to explore ways to measure the true effectiveness of each platform with a more complex but accurate attribution model. Conversion lift testing is on our cards, but if you know of another method, we’ll like to hear from you!